Representativity of First Authors in Psychology
A large proportion of first authors in psychology are located in North America or Europe, mostly in the US (ref1, ref2). In this dashboard, I present some aggregated data by continent, country, year, and journal (for first authors only).
The data from this report include information about publications from
one of six psychology journals (Developmental Psychology,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of
Abnormal Psychology, Journal of Family Psychology,
Health Psychology, and Journal of Educational
Psychology) for years 2020 to 2023. They include information about
the articles (e.g., title, abstract) as well as on the authors, such as
university of affiliation. I have obtained these data from PubMed using
the PubMed API through the easyPubMed package. I have
determined the country of the first author of each paper based on the
affiliation address by matching the university name with a world
university names database obtained from GitHub.
Missing data
Some of the papers were missing address information; in many cases, the PubMed API provided only the department and no university. It was not possible to identify the country in these cases (one would need to look at the actual papers one by one to make manual corrections). Furthermore, some university names from the data did not match the university name database obtained from GitHub. In some cases, I have brought manual corrections to university names in an attempt to reduce the number of missing values.
Next Steps
Possible future steps include: (a) obtaining a better, more current university name database (that includes country of university), (b) making manual corrections for other research institutes not included in the university database, (c) making a proper dashboard website, and (d) automatically updating the data every week or so.
* In this and all following tables, the percentages are calculated after excluding missing values. The Missing column shows the real percentage of missing values.